


Killer

by lesbianettes



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Death, Emotional Manipulation, Empathy, Episode Tag, Hallucinations, Hyperempathy, M/M, Murder, Murder Husbands, Panic Attacks, Sensory Overload
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:26:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27245716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianettes/pseuds/lesbianettes
Summary: Will's hyperempathy causes problems at the Hobbs crime scene
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 80





	Killer

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer I'm only like eight episodes into the show

He is cursed with what they lack. Psychopaths cannot empathize, they cannot put their feet into others’ shoes and stare out into their world, their feelings, their needs. Will has, for reasons he will never understand, become flooded with every single piece of empathy that these killers lack, and it gives him the gift of walking out into the crime scenes and knowing, instinctively, exactly what happened here and how. He feels it.

He feels Abigail Hobbes. 

As he tries to hold her throat together while the wait for help, her father (a murderer, a murderer Will murdered) dead against the cabinets, her blood gushes over his palms and he can feel her dying beneath him; this is a slow way to go. Her heart flutters in bursts that affect the pattern of her bleeding against his fingers, and she’s struggling for breath, hyperventilating and gasping and struggling. It is her desperation for life. 

Said life floods him, much stronger than the way he responds to the deaths, and he finds his own heaving lungs matching hers. Struggling. How can he breathe when Abigail Hobbes is unable? How can he save her when he killed the killer who kills her, murders her, tears them both apart by the throat and leaves them bloodier than Hell. Will cannot rescue her. But he tries. He struggles in it, and it crosses his mind that he can dig his fingers deeper into the wound than a knife.

Then Dr. Lecter arrives. He is calm, too calm, as he nudges Will’s hands out of the way and replaces them with his own, fingers so delicate like spider legs, but much more capable. Relieved of responsibility, Will falls back and clutches his own neck. He needs to breathe. Instead of breathing, he bleeds into his palms. He’s dying too. Still, he doesn’t distract from Abigail, even when his vision feels spotty and tears cloud his vision. He’s dying. He’s dying with her. The killer who killed the killer is killed. He would laugh hysterically if he had the breath. Instead, he skitters back, away from Abigail, and rests his head against the wall only a few short feet from Abigail’s father.

“Murderer!” Abigail’s desperate voice screams in his ears. She didn’t actually say anything, not in this moment, but he hears it from the look in her frightened eyes and feels it in the twitch of her pale hand. “Killer!”

Will would cover his ears if he didn’t feel his throat falling to pieces like hers. 

The paramedics arrive, going straight to her blood-soaked body, freeing Hannibal to kneel in front of Will and carefully pry his hands off his own skin. They’re bloody. He’s dying. He tries to explain that, but the words get caught, unable to reach his numb lips, and he just slams his head back into the wall. He hits it twice. On the third attempt, Hannibal cups his hand- also bloody, everything is bloody- behind Will’s head and absorbs the thump into the back of it rather than letting any more pain come calling. 

“Will,” he says. He sounds gentle. “You are alright. I want you to copy my breathing, can you do that?” Without waiting for an answer, he pulls him closer than anyone should, letting Will’s head rest against his chest as though they are some sort of lovers rather than two colleagues at a crime scene, a doctor and a killer. “Just breathe, copy my breathing.”

He holds him there, far too tight, for quite a long time while the coroners take bodies away and Abigail is loaded onto a stretcher and other crime scene analysts arrive to take a look at what’s happened. Jack gets there. He stares at them, at Will’s wide and glassy eyes as he’s crushed to Hannibal’s body, and shakes his head as though disappointed in him for cracking under all this pressure. It’s Jack who put the gun in his hand, Jack who put him on this case, Jack who- who-

Bile rises in his throat, and Hannibal gives him enough freedom to vomit on the floor as though he saw it coming before pulling him close once more. He feels disgusting with blood and sweat and tears and sick. A shower is in order, but he’s more preoccupied with staring at all the blood on the floor and approaching death himself with his slit throat. It’s not as important to be clean when he is dying. He doesn’t mind the mess if it’s almost over. 

He killed himself, he thinks.

He feels rather hysterical about the whole thing.

Hannibal shushes him, and even deigns to press his thin lips to Will’s temple in a deceptively maternal gesture, before standing and dragging Will up with him. He still can’t breathe normally, but it is less disastrous than before, and his wobbly colt legs carry him outside to be examined for shock and any injuries by the paramedics. With a shaking hand, he waves them away. He doesn’t want to be touched any more, certainly not by someone besides Hannibal, whose hand is still firm around his waist to hold him upright. 

“Are you alright, Will?” Jack asks.

“He’s fine,” Hannibal answers for him. “Just needs a couple days to recover.”

“Of course, Dr. Lecter.”

Regardless of how he feels about being discussed like a child, especially one who isn’t there, they talk about his fate and don’t acknowledge- at least when he can hear them- that he has become a killer now, and will likely be investigated if not prosecuted for what he’s done. Regardless of who it is done to, murder is still the same. No ritual makes it alright. Will throws up again, and is fairly sure it consists of his own blood. He questions that, given that no one else seems worried, but it certainly tastes like it in his mouth, just like the rest of the blood on his body that he is slowly choking on. This death has become less rapid. 

“May I take you home?”

He doesn’t know when everyone else left the scene, save for the cleaners. They must have, though, because now it’s just himself and Hannibal, who is pulling back toward the car they came in without waiting for a response- he likely knows that Will is too hurt, too fragile, too far gone to give one at all. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @neworleansspecial


End file.
